Subhash Jaireth, ‘Moments’ in Rochford Street Review

Subhash Jaireth has produced an increasingly rare thing in Australian prose fiction: a book that is both unashamedly intellectual and international in scope without succumbing to the awkward reverence that sometimes mars Australian writing. This is not to say that Moments is impenetrable or experimental (gasp!). On the contrary, it is a seductively written collection of stories that reimagines the lives of (mostly 20th century) prominent thinkers and artists through a series of vignettes. These are equally at home on a train to Leningrad as a rock formation in the Kimberley—equally up to the task of retelling the tragedy of an indigenous massacre as the horrors of Pinochet’s Chile. And yet the stories are subtle enough to make each tragic moment (and there are many, of varying degrees) uniquely felt. But this isn’t a book of sturm und drang. It’s a quiet book: a whisper; a slow dance; a growing realisation.

The success of these stories relies not on a pyrotechnic style, or what Raymond Carver called ‘cheap tricks’, but on a deft focalisation technique that takes the glare away from a story’s central subject (and their often well-rehearsed biographies) to rest upon tangential characters who have a certain connection, or particular way of seeing the subject. This in turn reveals that subject as an effect on someone else— a ripple in time and place if you like...